Monthly Archives: September 2010

Atheistheartmysticmind,
Explain this if you will.
Understanding things
In their manifold labels,
You only end up with
So many labeled things.

None of this is
What you may say it is.
That chair over there is either
A lovely Shaker creation,
Or specially shaved wood,
Or carbonhydrogenoxygen
Arrangedrearranged.
All the same either way.

Did you know
Carbon is just three
Helium nuclei
Scrunched together
Under tremendous heat and pressure?
One little hydrogen falls in
Gives you some nitrogen.
Push together four element twos,
And you get oxygen.
Stars make this stuff all the time,
And fill the universe with their handiwork
When they burn out and finish with their shining.

That’s all this all is.
Carl Sagan said it so long ago,
But you were too busy to hear.
Starstuff you, starstuff me.
Fragile collections of star’s stuff
That think and feel and wish and kill
Because in mystic heart and god-stuffed mind
They forget what they really are.
Forget how really rare this all is.
Distract their days with empty afterlife promises
And cheap delusions of heaven-choked grandeur.

Atheistheartmysticmind
Knows in the end
It’s all a likely story,
A lovely allegory,
But unless it cleaves close to scientific fact,
It’s just not where it’s all at.

When the time is right
I want to see you full of fire,
Full of love and explosive passion.
I want to see you sweat and strain,
And god damn to the world outside,
This is ours and ours alone
When the time is right.

No walls, no pretense, no shame.
Just two people as they are,
As they were born,
Lost in each other,
Lost in love,
Lost in paradise.

This world awaits us both,
My love, my wish embodied.
You are the one, the final one,
The alpha and omega of my life.

Kiss me once, again and on again,
Hold me and heal me as only you can.
If I should cry, if I should weep a bit,
I know you know it is in love and joy.

What amounts to various and simultaneous interactions along the electron shell–simple chemistry in a complex dance–that this can generate the self-replicating molecules that result in what we call life, and that that life can happen to observe the universe and itself as a “self” is amazing. Not so much mind-boggling as mind-expanding.

And there is no purpose to it other than perhaps helping thermodynamics along. As well as the progressive march of life itself into the void. Whether that life is homo sapiens or the gaggle of bacteria that work in tenuous balance to keep said sapiens sapiening makes no difference.

The only purpose is whatever purpose you decide upon. Myself, I like to write. And enjoy various sunrises and sunsets. The gas we exist in on this spinning rock, you see, does interesting things to the light that passes through it from the ball of plasma ninety-three million miles from here. Various atoms created in a long-extinct stellar furnace have come together over and again to create sunrises and sunsets, and to create the brain which makes the mind that calls itself a “self” and writes about something called a “fuchsia-purple sky on a winter evening in Kansas City in 1987.”

The problem arises when that “self” takes itself so seriously that it thinks it exists outside of the nature that made it possible, or outside of the clam chowder that is the brain.

The problem of evil, ladies and germs, is this very error–hamartia writ large.